Pitt Open Lab ‘I Voted’ button-making contest selects a Roc-themed winner

As the 2024 Presidential Election approached, many on-campus events took place encouraging students to participate in civic engagement by voting. One such event was the Pitt Open Lab’s “I Voted” Button Making Competition, which took place throughout the month of October and concluded with the official button-making between Nov. 5 and 6. 

The Pitt Open Lab is a collaboration between the University Center for Teaching and Learning and the University Library System. The lab is located on the ground floor of Hillman Library, where students, staff and faculty have access to a variety of machines and materials to aid in the assembly of creative projects. The lab also hosts a number of workshops, classes and training for students and staff to gain hands-on experience with the services the lab offers. 

The competition, in which Pitt students were invited to submit an ‘I Voted’ button design was started, as Open Lab manager Aaron Graham said, to encourage students to vote.

“It’s popular at polling sites when people vote that they are given a sticker or a button that says ‘I Voted,’ so people have started to run these design contests over the past couple of years,” Graham said. “One of my student staff members proposed we run our own button contest. We figured it’s a fun intersection of art and design and figured that it would encourage people to vote as well as to come visit the lab.” 

The student staff member Graham says the contest  was started by V. White, a junior neuroscience student, who was inspired by an ‘I Voted’ sticker design contest held in Fulton County, New York in 2022, in which a playful spider design was crowned the winner. White wanted to create a space for Pitt students to express their own creativity and embody the “whimsy of the Pitt community” through button designs. 

“I thought the contest would encourage some people to vote and bring some excitement about the election,” White said.

When the competition winner was announced on the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 5 on the Open Lab Instagram, students discovered that the winning design was not submitted by a Pitt student, but rather a Slippery Rock University student, sparking controversy. As this was a Pitt-sponsored event intended to be contained exclusively to the Pitt community, the Open Lab took action immediately declaring first-year electrical engineering student, Madison Kenney, the new and, as the lab felt, rightful winner of the competition in a follow up post. In the caption of this post, the Open Lab referred to the Slippery Rock student who infiltrated the competition as a “carpetbagger,” fueling debates as to whether this was an appropriate response in the comment section. This caption has since been removed and comments on the post have been deleted.

Members of the Slippery Rock community were not pleased with the Open Lab’s word choice in reference to the actions of the false winner, and they made these sentiments clear in the comment section of the lab’s post. It is for this reason, Graham said, that the original Instagram post caption has been removed.

“There was some confusion about the rules of the contest that maybe we didn’t make clear enough. At the end of the day we wanted to make sure that the button reflected the Pitt community, so we decided to go with the design that was designed by a Pitt Student,” Graham said. “After some playful back and forth in the comment section of our Instagram post, we decided it was detracting from the point of the contest which was to have a fun button that everyone at the University of Pittsburgh could enjoy.”

In response to the events that led up to her eventual win, Kenney is glad that the Open Lab decided to keep the competition exclusive to Pitt students. 

“I think that the Open Lab made the right decision in excluding the Slippery Rock student,” Kenney said. “The contest was run by a Pitt organization for Pitt students, and it was just meant to be a fun activity.”

It was this desire to bring fun, lighthearted energy to a very serious election that inspired Kenney to submit a design for consideration in the contest. Her design, titled “Roc on a Rainbow,” features Roc the Panther in an American flag tee shirt riding a unicorn atop a rainbow.

“I thought the contest would be a fun way to get involved with voting on campus,” Kenney said. “I wanted to lighten it up a little bit, a lot of people are taking the election really seriously this year . . . I wanted to bring something a little more fun to it.”

In addition to bringing a positive energy to election season, Kenney feels that as a college student and first time voter herself, it is important to use her voice to encourage other students to get out and vote.

“It’s really important to have your voice heard from a young age,” Kenney said. “For a lot of college students this is their first time voting in a presidential election . . . even though it can seem like voting isn’t that big of a deal, a lot of young people have issues they really care about, so putting in their vote is super important in making sure their voice is heard.”

The Open Lab hopes that this competition will encourage more students to come in and take advantage of their services.

”We want people to come visit the lab so they can see all the awesome things they can do here for free,” Graham said.

Even as the competition faced a controversial start, the Open Lab still had a number of students turn out for the making of Kenney’s ‘Roc on a Rainbow’ design on Nov. 5, with over 50 students signing in to create their own election day memento.